Читать книгу Notes on Noses онлайн

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Nevertheless, we must earnestly protest against the fallacy of attempting to judge what any person is from his Nose; we can only judge of natural tendency and capacity—education and external circumstances of a thousand different kinds, may have swerved the mind from its original tendency, or prevented the development of inherent faculties. It is in this unfair and uncharitable asserting dogmatically the disposition and character, vices and virtues, of a man, that phrenologists so greatly err; whereas they ought to confine their inferences from external development of organs, to capacity and tendency only.

The impossibility of giving such numerous pictorial illustrations as the subject properly demands, will confine the examples adduced to those only of which portraits are well known and easily accessible. If, therefore, the proofs are thought insufficient in number, it must be attributed to this circumstance alone. It would have been easy to have swelled them by a number of names, the right of which to be included in the lists the majority of persons would have been unable to verify. Nevertheless, the examples will be found much more numerous and more easily verifiable than those which have been deemed sufficient to establish Phrenology as an hypothesis, if not as a science; and, had we, like the principal expounder of Phrenology,^[3] dragged in as ‘proofs’ nameless gentlemen of our acquaintance, we might have still further extended the lists of examples. But it seemed to our humble judgment, to be demanding more from the reader’s good nature than would be compatible with sound criticism, to ask him to accept such unsupported dicta as proofs. Of course, very many of the examples by which our own mind has been satisfied have been drawn from personal observation, among friends and acquaintance; and not only have these been the most numerous proofs, but also by far the most satisfactory, as they afforded the most exact and undeniable profiles, and the most noticeable mental characteristics. The slightest incorrectness in the artist, may render useless a pictorial example; but when we are looking upon the original itself, there can be no mistake. A thousand minutiæ of character may escape a biographer, which appear plainly in the man himself.